“Easy there, Tex, You’ll shoot someone’s eye out.” My uncle said, and then pointed at the door to the kitchen laughing. “Go ahead, aim for the center.”
My eyes went wide and I grinned impishly before aiming at the center of the driftwood door and pulling the trigger. Nothing happened.
“Safety, doofus.” My uncle mocked. Feeling somewhat embarrassed but undeterred, I flipped the safety catch and pulled the trigger again. The crossbow jumped in my hand and the bolt planted itself firmly into the driftwood with a satisfying “plunk.” Still grinning, I went to the door and pulled on the quarrel which stubbornly refused to come out. My uncle grinned, walked over and gave it a good tug, and it popped out with a whine of protest from the driftwood.
“We need to put some more muscle on that frame of yours, so that it won’t be so hard to do stuff like this without resorting to your power.”
“I suppose I have time for it now, don’t I?” I said, prodding my biceps. I didn’t think of myself as weak, in fact I always thought I was pretty buff, but I guess it wouldn’t hurt to do what he said and bulk up a little.
“You ‘bout ready, hoss?” My uncle asked, slinging an assortment of weaponry over his shoulder, both modern and medieval looking. I nodded, and he reached into his pocket pulled out two shiny silver packages and tossed one at me. I caught it and gave him a questioning look.
“Energy bar?” I asked.
“Eat up; you’ll need your strength.” He said, folding his own in half and eating it in one bite. I grimaced and bit into mine, it tasted something like wet cardboard and rotten chocolate, and maybe a bit of fish oil. I hate energy bars. With that, we left the shop and awkwardly got into the Charger before heading to Bay Boulevard.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He parked the Charger back at a parking lot near a trolley station and we walked along the dirt service road following the tracks south towards the power plant as the faint orange glow of the sun slowly disappeared over the horizon. We walked for a relatively short distance, excepting the short breaks we had to take to hide from a passing trolley or two, and came to a cross street. My uncle veered west across the tracks and stopped on the other side near an overpass while I caught up to him. I understood his caution—it would draw a lot of attention if a couple of guys in black clothes and leather jackets were walking around with swords and guns and, upon closer inspection, grenades and wooden stakes.
“You alright, kiddo?” My uncle asked while looking over the state of his own gear and making sure he hadn’t lost anything.
“Yeah, this isn’t so bad,” I responded. “Ever humped ten miles uphill with a seventy-pound pack on as well as weapons and ammo? This is cake.”
I was lying. The stakes poked my ribs with every stride and the awkward straps from my sword and crossbow kept slipping or loosening of their own accord. It wasn’t tiringly heavy, but it was bordering on the excruciatingly awkward. I’d have to remind myself to get a good tactical vest instead of dealing with the constant, painful reminders of piss poor gear management.
“We’re gonna turn on the juice to get to the other side, here. It’s too bright out there; we’ll get spotted for sure. Run under the bridge, and jump to the other side of the street. Stay on the left of that small park over there, aim for the ditch over there. Tide’s out, you shouldn’t get too wet.”
“Oh, not too wet. Fantastic.” I replied. I looked under the bridge. The night traffic wasn’t heavy, but there was a running car in sight at all times. There was a ditch that ran alongside the road on the far side of the road on the opposite of the bridge, and turned around a small park and went north into the ocean. I was going to have to jump six lanes of road. I grabbed my uncle by the shoulder. “That’s a bit of a long jump, isn’t it? Why don’t we just, you know, walk?”
He grinned devilishly at me. “Nah, kiddo. That’s nothing. Well, I mean, it’s something, but just focus your energy into your legs and stomach and you should be fine. We don’t wanna get spotted by lookouts or authorities.”
“Why my stomach?” I asked.
“You’re gonna need it for balance. It’s not like doing the full body thing; you’re trying to specialize your approach here. Just like if you were going to punch me, you wouldn’t just charge up your fist, you’d charge up your whole arm and torso down to your hips.”
I shrugged and made a sweeping gesture. “Ladies first, unc.”
He laughed and slapped me on the back, making my sword rattle in its scabbard. “Hah! Chump. See you on the other side!”
And like that, he was gone. I barely saw the blur of him dashing across the road, and I had to admit once more I was jealous. I focused on my power and felt it course pleasantly through me. With an effort of will I forced it into my legs and abdomen until they glowed, sparkling in my vision. I waited for traffic to clear up sufficiently, and then dashed out of the bushes and under the bridge, and skidded along the sidewalks I tried to align myself with the other side of the road. I bent at the knees and the ground almost felt soft as I kicked into the air.
I kicked way too hard. Instantly I was a good twenty feet in the air and flailing as I came down, but once again I’d somehow got the trajectory right. I landed hard on the grass next to the runoff ditch and ran for it.
“Fence!” I heard a voice shout, and just as I heard it I felt a sharp pain in my chest and fell back with the world spinning around me. I heard my uncle laughing and gasping as he came out of the ditch and jumped over the fence with easy and knelt next to me. “You alright, hoss?”
“How’s the fence?” I managed to cough out as my breath slowly came back. My uncle laughed and patted me on the back.
“I reckon you did more damage to it than it did to you. C’mon, we’ve got to get a move on. Those bloodsuckers will be out and about any minute, and I’d hate to get spotted.” He was right on both counts. The fence had a large U-shaped bend in it now, though my chest didn’t hurt nearly as much as it should—I figured my power had softened that blow for me. I let my power fade back into myself and instantly felt a lot worse about running into the fence. I was sure I’d at the very least bruised a rib or two since I’d lucked out and the stakes in my jacket hadn’t stabbed into me. And we hadn’t even run into a vampire yet. Perfect start.
We jumped the fence and made our way along the ditch towards the ocean. There was a light film of disgustingly dark, brackish water on the bottom of it, growing slowly deeper as we made our way further and further. The smell at this point wasn’t pleasant either. A mixture of the fish and salt smell of the ocean on top of the stink of decaying plants and possibly animals seemed to come in at me from all sides. I indicated as much to my uncle by waving my hand under my nose. He whispered to me, “Oh right, I forgot.” And put out his cigar, “Don’t want them to smell us coming.”
I laughed under my breath and suddenly my uncles arm struck out and stopped me out of a dead run, slapping softly but ultimately as immovably as a statue against my chest. I caught his hand in the solar plexus and doubled over for a moment as the relatively soft blow knocked the wind out of me again.
“Shh.” My uncle said as I gasped. I gave him my “Why did you just stop me solid when I was running flat out?” look, and he pointed at his eyes and then pointed further ahead in the direction we were traveling. He crouched and dragged me down, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was the professional being led around by the rookie, but then I noticed what he was talking about.
Two vampires were crossing the ditch ahead of us, dressed as vagrants. Somehow I instinctively knew they were vampires. I focused my vision and thin tainted auras hung about their bodies like red smoke.
“Don’t look too hard or they’ll sense it. Making their aura more visible means you use a tiny bit of power to see it. They latch on to that kind of shit.” My uncle whispered. We stayed crouched down until the vampires were out of sight—it didn’t seem like they noticed us. We both rose and kept running, albeit a bit more quietly now. If the vampires were ou
t, it was likely that they would see us coming before we saw them.
“Keep that power bottled up inside of you, kiddo.” My uncle breathed to me as we ran, “If we get too close they’ll sense us right away, and you don’t have too much practice at suppressing your aura. Damn, but I didn’t think you’d need the practice.”
I nodded and consciously tried to bury the energy deep down so that I couldn’t see it. My uncle was right; it was hard to pull off. The best I could do was make it so I couldn’t see my aura anymore, but I was sure that if a vampire got close enough they would “smell” my aura before they caught a whiff of my aftershave (not that I wore any).
We left the ditch and climbed over the berm to our left as the power plant came into view and the water grew just barely too deep to run swiftly and silently. We made our way over the hard packed ground around the plant, pouring on a little more speed so we wouldn’t be in the open. We dashed to the other side and encountered another berm, noticing on the other side of it was another outlet stream when we climbed over it.
“Shit.” My uncle muttered. The stream bed was about six feet wide, but was clearly insurmountable without making noise or using our power. “Marsh to our right, too bright to our left. We’re gonna cross it slow. Try and be quiet.”
I nodded and followed him down the ditch into the mush. The smell was awful here, and the water concealed several inches of mud that sucked at my boots with every step while the water itself soaked my socks. We slogged slowly across it and hauled ourselves out and up the berm on the other side. My boots squelched as we walked along the berm towards the ocean, trying to circumvent the brightly lit plant as much as we could until we could make a dash for the warehouse on the other side.
After a minute of walking, we saw that it wasn’t going to be entirely possible to get to the warehouse undetected unless we wanted to swim. My uncle and I came to a stop on one side of a long parking lot which, while not brightly lit, was still illuminated somewhat from the lights of the plant. My uncle looked at his watch.
“Huh. Couple minutes after ten. I suspect a lot of them are still inside,” he said. “Get your sword ready, we’re gonna run up there, and as soon as we get to the door we’ll turn on the mojo. Run in dicks swingin’, so to speak.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “Ready when you are.”
He grabbed me by the shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “You stay behind me; I want you to have my back. If anything goes wrong,” He reached in his pocket and handed me his keyring. “You take off and don’t stop running ‘til you get to the Charger. Drive back home and wait for me there. Got it?”
“It won’t come to that, right?” I said with a nervous chuckle. “I mean, how many of these have you done?”
“Tons buddy; this should be a cakewalk for us. Probably just a little nest of six or seven vamps, all young ones, maybe one old one. That’s how they usually are. Can’t tell yet from here without giving us away, but it’s good to be prepared. And take your sword off and carry it, it’s hard to draw over the shoulder like that—this ain’t the movies.”
I chuckled again and unslung my sword. My crossbow settled more comfortably against my back and I relished the relief since it had been digging into my back at an awkward angle for our entire run. I held my sword by the scabbard at my left side and crouched low next to my uncle. We stayed crouched and took off at a hunched sprint for the warehouse, not more than a hundred and a half yards away. We reached it in seconds, and the windows were all conspicuously dark. My uncle had spiked knuckles in his right hand and a machete in his left, and I felt oddly outclassed even though I was the one with the sword.
My uncle nodded to me and I felt, rather than saw, the strength of his power as he tapped into it. I reached for my own power and it came easily and naturally this time, enhancing my excitement into an almost nervous glee. I had to squint as my power allowed me to see the brilliant glow of my uncle’s aura. He kicked in the door and I followed him in.
Two bug-eyed vampire heads turned and looked at us and howled in horror as my uncle appeared to slide up to one without moving his legs and punched one in the head, knocking it free from the neck. The other ran to the opposite side of the room and I lunged forward, drawing my sword and slashing in a wide horizontal arc that separated the vampire’s chest from the lower half of its body. The vampire flopped around as its legs and stomach began to burn and opened its mouth in a noiseless scream. I actually felt a little sick as I saw the loose diaphragm trailing around on the floor as it attempted to crawl away. I stepped forward and plunged my sword down into the back of the vampire’s neck and twisted it, a sickening crunch and popping sound signaling that I’d completely separated the vertebrae. I dragged the tip of the sword along the floor back towards me and the rest of the flesh of the neck followed. What was left of the vampire twitched once and was rapidly consumed in red flames. The room we were in seemed like it would have been some kind of front office before the vampires made it their home, and almost looked fake because of the poor construction—the walls weren’t even painted. I shrugged at the thought. Now it was just a stinking and abandoned square urn for their ashes.
My uncle made his way to the door and I followed, noticing there were sounds coming from within the next room. I stood next to him and nodded to him. He nodded back and set his shoulder against the door, pushing it in and splintering the frame with the force of his blow. I followed in closely behind him and he tossed the door to the side.
“What the hell?” My uncle said. The next room was so dark as to seem like the air itself was filled with octopus ink. He took two steps forward and I followed.
“Shit! Run!” He shouted as from behind us I heard doors slam open and laughing voices fill the previous room. Bars descended through the doorway and closed us off as lights flickered on all around us and black smoke dissipated into nothing as I looked around.
There were at least twenty ghoulishly grinning vampires standing around us. Each of them looked remarkably different from the vampires I’d seen before, including the deep red auras now emanating from every individual. Each of them had different bony protrusions from their faces and joints, and many were fat while some were skinny. A few were even well built, if you didn’t notice the strange shapes their bones made under their skin. Between us were thick shining bars of metal—my uncle and I had run into a cage. One of the vampires stepped forward, a dusky black robe draped around his partially exposed and horrifically emaciated frame. His face seemed markedly less human than the rest, with spikes of bone protruding from his eyebrows and cheekbones, and even curved ridges around his head. I wondered how he managed to feed at all, since there was no way he would pass for a person. His aura seemed to absorb more light than it gave off, appearing completely black like coal smoke, with small tinges of red light on the outer edges.
“Ahh, gentlemen,” The vampire’s tenor voice had a hint of an English accent to it. “Welcome to the party. It took so long for you to finally accept my many invitations.”
“Fuckin’ trap.” My uncle muttered. “’Bout half these vamps gotta be at least a few hundred years old, maybe older.”
“Oh, indeed my friends, some of us are far older. We are, after all, the oldest bloodline.” The vampire grinned at my uncle and then turned his black-and-red eyes on me. “Young master Magnus! I had so hoped to make your acquaintance. I’ve heard so much about you since the death of my dear brother, Eurus.” The vampire smiled not unkindly at me, as if he was completely sincere in being pleased.
“Don’t suppose I can get your name?” I asked, returning the smile for no reason I could think of.
“Oh, how rude of me! I had forgotten, due to the circumstance of our meeting. My name is Thanatos—yes, just Thanatos. I am the progenitor of the Thanatic vampire bloodline. It is a great honor to meet you, John. May I call you by your first name? You look remarkably like your mother, not something I would expect in a male child.”
“Holy shit.” My uncle said, and fo
r the first time I saw fear in his eyes.
“Yes, Ignatius Magnus, I remember you all too well. It’s been quite a good while since Nazi Germany, but nonetheless—my, look at how you’ve grown these past few decades. Are you still roaming the world, trying to make it a better place? Your aura is still so delightfully… corrupted.”
“Not for a long time, pal.” My uncle spat, reaching into his pocket. Several vampires hissed as my uncle grinned and pulled out a fresh cigar and lit it. “Been trying this new thing—killing monsters only. Apparently it’s what kids are in to these days.”
“Please, let’s not try and bait each other into a philosophical debate. There’s so much more that awaits us all.” Thanatos said, spreading his hands wide. “I’ve come such a long way to be here personally for you. And you even brought the young John Magnus to meet me! I admit, I had not planned for that. The young hunter who slew one of my brothers on the day of his true birth, such a thing has never been done. Such power you have inherited; I cannot conceal my amazement. I had thought we’d have to run him down separately—oh how I hoped for a merry pursuit.”
“Uh, thanks?” I said, and then turned to my uncle. “Got a plan?”
“Yup.” My uncle said and blew a gray cloud of smoke towards the ancient vampire that stood smiling in front of us.
“Now then my friends; don’t be hasty. This cell has been specially designed, I have been assured. Even if you could bend the bars—I have no doubt that you could, Ignatius—the cage has been electrified with a current that would instantly kill most normal human beings. Ingenious thing, electricity. Who would have thought that mere humans would have discovered something so useful? All the power of lightning at their fingertips, and yet they still seem to live in darkness.”
I looked around for a moment, and the true gravity of the situation hadn’t really hit me until just then. More than twenty vampires, grinning at us but well out of reach of my sword. The only weak point seemed to be the door we came in because the bars were not actually welded into place.
The Chronicles of a Vampire Hunter (Book 1): Red Ashes Page 12